This paper examines the impact of inter-team competition within an organization on employees’ job crafting. Drawing on social comparison theory and self-determination theory, we hypothesized an inverted U-shape relationship between inter-team competition and team members’ job crafting, moderated by the leadership orientations of team leaders. Our empirical analysis is based on a dataset comprising 722 individuals nested in 133 teams within a prominent restaurant chain in China. As expected, our findings reveal that inter-team competition had an inverted U-shaped relationship with team members’ task, relational, and cognitive crafting. Intriguingly, we discovered that task-oriented leadership tends to mitigate the effects of inter-team competition on team members’ task crafting and relational crafting. In contrast, relationship-oriented leadership exacerbates these effects. However, we noted that employees’ cognitive crafting was not significantly affected by the interplay of inter-group competition and leadership orientation. These insights contribute to the literature on job crafting and leadership, highlighting the critical role of relational dynamics within an organization. Our study not only enhances the understanding of how an optimal level of competitive environments can boost job crafting but also underscores the pivotal role of leadership in moderating these effects, particularly in scenarios where the internal competition deviates from this optimal level.
